Wednesday, 15 July 2009

ESKY Lama back in action!

By the wonders of E-commerce, my early Monday morning order of a replacement helicopter tail boom arrived today (Wednesday). Unfortunately the Royal Mail did not ring the door bell and just dumped the parcel on the door step, so goodness knows how long it had been sitting there for the World and his dog to see.

The tail boom kit from Miracle Mart included a fake engine and side buckets. The engine comprised of 10 tiny components which took me just as many minutes to assemble with some poly-cement glue. It has been a while since I did any gluing at this kind of detail; I used a match stick to help me dab the glue in the correct places, but I've come to realise my eye sight is not as good as it was since I last made Airfix kits when I was 12 years old!

So here's the assembled engine (note the tiny grill on the air intake, sweet!):

Fixing the tail boom was relatively straight forward, it just required unscrewing 4 tiny 2.5mm long screws and screwing on the new flexible replacement. Easy with the right micro screwdriver.

I did not attach the side buckets as they added just a little too much weight for my liking. Also, the instructions suggested they should be attached using double sided tape and I could imaging seeing them pop off during a bad landing and flying up through the blades causing all sorts of blade carnage.

Here's the results of my 20 minutes of work:

I then took it out for a quick late evening spin and it works well; I don't think the new parts are much heavier than the original parts, and they look better and the boom is far more resilient to bad landings. Result!